In the last article, I talked about the need for personalizing the customer experience. In this article, I want to take a deeper view on what the cable companies could do on the customer experience.
Cable companies have traditionally been at the bottom bracket of Customer Satisfaction surveys. Not much effort was put in improving customer experience since the consumer choice was fairly limited. The monopolistic nature of the business allowed the cable operators to get away with not so great customer service. Not any more! Like we discussed in the earlier article, the last 2 years have changed the landscape in the industry substantially. Growth has slowed down and reversed in some markets. Competition has emerged from Telco community who also have a lot of muscle. Innovation has created different kind of competition with the likes of Google voice, Hulu, Joost and others.
With the new reality, and the necessity of retaining existing customers and ensuring that new customer would prefer them over competition, the cable operators need to take a serious re-look at their overall customer experience strategy. In my view, there are 3 broad areas that they need to focus on. These areas also correspond to the experience touch points that the consumer have with the operator
1. Sales and Marketing experience:
a) Provide a simplified sales experience through the web: Most of the cable Operators need to improve their overall web experience and increase the sales through the web channel. Currently, the % sales that the cable operators are able to do through the web is much smaller than the overall Telco industry and very low as compared with the Retail industry. As the internet is becoming increasing prevalent and a preferred channel for buying, improving overall sales through web becomes very important. These companies should look at the Amazon's of the world for inspiration. Online Retail industry has gone a long distance in making the overall buying experience simpler and richer. There is a lot that can be adopted.
b) Anticipate the consumer needs and proactively recommend products and services: The cable companies have a unique advantage of already being in the homes of a large number of people in the country. The need for the operators is to use this advantage to understand and anticipate their customers better. The cable companies are running a initiative called as Canoe which focuses around collecting usage data from the set top boxes and using BI engine on top of the data to create meaningful information. While there is a lot of doubt with Privacy concerns, my belief is that once they work through the initial hick-ups, this will provide a powerful tool for the operators to anticipate the consumer requirements and position the right products and services in time to meet their need.
c) Provide integrated sales to order fulfillment experience. Move towards flow through provisioning: Even today, there is a lot of swivel chair that happens during the Order processing cycle. If the operators can invest in realizing the flow through provisioning for most of their products and services, it will go a long way in improving the initial customer experience and also help in faster revenue realization.
d) Provide an opportunity to reach a real person on the phone in less than 60 seconds : One of the most frustrating experiences is to hold for an sales or customer service rep to come on the line. Many times, the wait can be as long as 30 minutes. There are many things the operators can do to reduce this. First is to make the alternate channels like the internet and self-service stronger and better. This will divert the traffic and reduce the load on the call centers. Also, they might have to look at increasing the agents by going to low cost location and balancing the cost, but improving the experience.
2. Support Experience: The challenge here is to move to be proactive from reactive, to be predictive from diagnostic, and to reduce the Time to Resolve for any support request the customer may have. There are many areas that the operators can focus on
a) Use of knowledge management to get to the bottom of issues in less time: Thousands of service reps providing service and resolving customer issues are creating huge experiential knowledge that is not getting captured and re-used today. The need for the operators to put in places systems, processes and incentives for the service reps to record their service experiences in a re-usable form. The intelligence engine and UI behind this should provide a way for service reps and for consumers (through self -service) to be able to diagnose the problems quicker and find resolutions faster. This will not increase reduce the Opex cost but also improve customer experience significantly.
b) Alternate channels like chat and video calls: With the advancement of technology, there are tools available today that can allow for Consumers to interact with the service reps through chat as well as video conversations. This needs to be leveraged as well. The backend for the Chat function can be moved to a low cost location to get better bang for the buck.
c) Provide updates on when an outage might impact the consumer: There is a need for a major overhaul in the service assurance framework of the operators. While the operators do get alarms from network elements when they are not functioning well, there is a bigger need to be able to co-relate these alarms, identify network dependencies so that the downstream impact of a network element on a services and locations can be established. Eventually, the framework should be able to reach out to the impacted customers proactively, thereby preventing huge spike in service calls
d) Predict failures on the network before they happen and put in measures to fix them: The ability of the network to predict failures sand thereby prevent possible outages is someone that the operators should aspire for. Again, a solid service assurance framework with a predictive model needs to be implemented.
e) Provide a social community based expert help for product and services: The operators need to implement community support functions like blogs, wikis and many others that are widely used today in other industries. These provide an additional source of help for the customers and also go a long way in improving the customer experience through very less investment. The Operator can themselves be connected on these networks and ensure that the questions are getting addressed.
f) Provide the ability to view and analyze bills and recommend better plans: Many of the customer calls to the call centers are around billing queries. The Operators can divert and reduce many of these calls by provide the consumer the ability to drill down into their bills and also provide the ability to analyze their bills. They should also implement a recommendation engine which can recommend better plans based on usage patterns.
g) Be able to reach a real person on the Phone within 60 seconds: This is again the same as listed under point Sales Experience. Also, if the operators most of the things listed in bullets in this section, the actual calls to call centers would drop significantly.
3. Service Usage experience:
a) Invest in Usability Experience of products and services: Along with creating a product or service which has good functionality, it is equally important to ensure that it very usable. Any easy way to understand this is to look at Apple products. They all bring in an excellent visual experience to the users as well as a simple and efficient way to use the products. Simplicity, efficiency, visual aesthetics, consistency, minimum steps, performance are all very important considerations, perhaps as important as the feature functions.
b) Bring Multichannel capabilities: With the improvement in connectivity and data transfer speeds, home Television is just one of the many devices that the consumers want to view their content on. The operators need to move fast to provide this multi screen experience to the customers.
c) Competitive Feature functionality - Faster Innovation cycle: Big companies are facing increasing pressure from small, niche players who can bring innovation much faster to the market. Operators need to re-look at the their systems, processes, org structure and culture to create a eco-system to respond faster to their user requirements. The need for quick innovation is relatively new to this industry and will require a major internal over haul to make it happen.
d) Convergence: Another way to fight the competition from niche players is to be able to create offerings which can combine the multiple products as a differentiated service. Services like Phone Ubiquity with one number or to be able to use the Home Phone from Mobile or Web, Video services available through Mobile and Internet, Universal Address book and Voice Mail that can sync up between different phones - home phones and mobiles, Caller ID on PC, TV and Mobile, manage home phone and TV through Mobile, web; and many others.
Each of these areas can be further expanded with a lot more data and details, but that for another time.
